Revenge Knows No Bounds
by Max Alleyne
Summary: I take a deep breath and count to five, letting my anger increase with each number.  My revenge knows no bounds. Written for Starvation Monthly Challenge.


**This was written for the Starvation Monthly Challenge. The prompt was five (hint: look at both form and content). Also, any constructive criticism is welcome on this, because it was really difficult to write, and I would love to know what works and what doesn't. **

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I'm wet. I'm cold. I'm hurting. I'm tired. I'm pissed.

I'm soaked to the bone.

I haven't been dry since they pulled me out of the arena. Hell, I haven't been dry since the beginning of the Games. If it isn't water, it's been blood, sweat, tears or piss. If given the choice—which I haven't been, in case you're wondering—I would go with water. But then, my preferences don't much matter to _them_; only my answers do, and they really don't care for those.

My entire body is soaking wet. Snow must really like the "drowned rat" look, because they keep dumping buckets of water on me. I'm sure that if I could see my fingers they would be pruny and wrinkled. Maybe that will be the new fashion trend in the Capitol: the pruny drowned rat. Somehow, I don't think it'll catch on; it might have something to do with the fact that no one—aside from the guards—can actually see how _fabulous _it looks on me.

Of course, everyone in Panem did get to see me covered from head to toe in blood, so maybe that look will catch on. What they don't get to see is the way that blood is gushing from my broken nose or the bloody circles around my wrists from tugging at my restraints. I'm sure that my lips are bright red, decorated with blood from my split lips and broken mouth. It's wet and slippery and metallic tasting, and it makes me want to gag. I know that each bright red drop is my life leaking out, but it is also reminding me that I'm alive.

As much as I've tried not to show any weakness, I'm not invincible. I was sweating from the heat in the arena, and I'm still sweating in interrogation, though temperature has nothing to do with it. After a while, the sweat mingles with tears, despite my attempts to stop them. My guards like the sweat and tears better than the blood. Sweat and tears makes them think that I'm one step closer to breaking.

But as bad as blood, sweat, and tears may be, the piss is the worst. I can't move, which means that every five hours or so—or when they shock me and I can't control my bladder any more—I feel the warm wetness of defeat and humiliation running down my legs. And the guards don't bother to step out of the room to take a leak, not when it's so much more convenient and _entertaining _to use me instead. Even President Snow stopped by to personally use my facilities. I'm wet and hating it.

Maybe I'm freezing to death.

I wasn't cold in the arena, but I am now. There's a line between painfully cold and numb and, unfortunately, I'm on the painfully cold side of things. Each shock that they send tearing through my body makes me feel like I'll shatter into five million tiny, bloody pieces. The cold makes every slap, punch, and kick sting five times worse than it did when I first came in, when I was warm. The cold reaches all the way into my bones, and I don't know that I'll ever be warm again.

But the cold is so much deeper than just a few shivers and some stinging slaps. Every time one of them opens their damn traps, their voices are sharp and frigid. They're either asking questions or telling me about all the things that they're going to do to me when I don't answer correctly. I don't doubt for a minute that they won't do it. It sends shivers down my spine and makes the cold seem that much more inescapable.

When you die—like everyone does at some point in time, though not soon enough for some—your body temperature drops. I've got plenty of experience with dead bodies—too much, truth be told—but I was only around a few long enough for them to get cold. In the Games, all the bodies are taken away as soon as it's confirmed that they're dead. Some of them were still warm enough to trick anyone into thinking that they were still alive. But I'm thinking that won't happen to me; my body is already cold and I'm still breathing.

My mom was the first cold body that I ever touched; I held her hand for just a second before I dropped it out of shock. Dad was lying in the coffin next to hers; there was a hole in his chest from where a Capitol-sent henchman had stabbed him. My little brothers—Jacob and Joseph—looked like they were sleeping, but I knew better than that. The strain of losing them all in a home invasion gone wrong—yeah, right—gave my poor grandmother a heart attack a convenient three days after the funerals. The only five people that I cared about were cold in the ground.

I try to embrace the cold, to melt into it the way that my family did. No matter how much I try, though, the guards' threatening words cut through the haze and bring me back to this cold, wet world where I'm constantly degraded. I mean, they're wearing long-sleeved sweaters from Christ's sake. It seems so ridiculous because they're just going to stain the sweaters with my blood, and that stain isn't going to come out. I try to laugh at it, but I'm too wet and cold, and I fucking hate it.

The pain is almost overwhelming.

It really wasn't that bad at first. I think they were just playing with me, trying to scare me into telling them everything I know. When it didn't work, they started with a beating—cracking some ribs, bruising my kidneys. I hurt like hell and made breathing agony, but I can stand it. I can take the beatings.

So then they moved on to bigger and better things. That's when they decided to pull out my fingernails. Five—one, two, three, four, five—from each hand. And when that doesn't work, they pull one, two, three, four, five toenails from each foot. I still wasn't telling them anything, so they started to make shallow, stinging cuts all over my body. That's when I started screaming.

But screaming isn't enough for them unless you're screaming answers to their questions. That's when they tied me to a metal frame, doused me with even more damn water, and decided to play with the electrodes. They started slowly, with the lowest setting—which doesn't feel that low at all, thank you—but worked their way up to the highest one. "Level five can kill you," they kept saying. It sure as hell feels that way.

The shocks are tearing my body apart. My heart is pounding, and my breathing is stopping, but somehow I'm still alive. Every muscle tenses and spasms while the electricity runs through my body and I try not to bite through my tongue. The metal frame makes clanging noises as I convulse, and my guards keep laughing. They seem to find my shock-induced dancing to be oh-so-fucking-hysterical.

Everything hurts. From the tips of my toes—now bloody and torn and without toenails—to the top of my head—which is now bald—waves of pain crash over me. My throat is sore from screaming, but I keep doing it anyway because there's nothing else to do. It hurts so damn much, but I use the pain to cut through the haze that's starting to cloud my mind. I'm hurting, but still hanging on.

I'm exhausted, but still alive.

The trouble with hanging on is that it takes so much energy—energy that I don't have. They haven't let me sleep for more than a few hours at a time, and my eyes are starting to mess with me. I'm seeing double and triple and five-iple (I've forgotten the right word), but at least I'm not hallucinating yet. That might be the one saving grace in this whole damn mess, because I don't know what I would say if I lost control of my mind. Maybe I should bite through my tongue, after all.

The truth of the matter is, no matter how prepared you think you are, nothing can prepare you for hours of pain and the bone-crushing exhaustion that comes with them. No one will ever tell you that by the time all is said and done, you'll just want it all to stop. They don't tell you about how you'll be so tired that you'll beg for sleep or unconsciousness or death. No one tells you that you'll be too exhausted to keep fighting. But as tired as I am, I have to keep fighting until I find some way to keep from telling them everything.

There are so many ways to just give up the ghost and die. I keep thinking about how easy it would be to take a deep breath while they're dousing me with water, or the way that I could bite my tongue and choke on the blood. It would be easy enough to goad one of the guards into hitting me too hard or too much. They don't feed me all that often anyway, so starving myself to death probably wouldn't take all that long. Maybe I'll just get lucky and one of them will leave the electric current on level five for just five seconds too long.

I'll be the first to tell you that I'm a selfish person, and that I don't particularly _want _to die for the cause. That doesn't mean that I won't do it, though. I just can't see that many other options available for me right now, not in this position. But as tired as I am, I won't do. I guess I'm just too stubborn for that.

When you sign up to be a rebel—not that it actually happens that way—they tell you that you're doing a great service to the people of Panem. After God only knows how many hours of torture—five, fifteen, fifty, five hundred, it's all the same—you're not thinking about the good of Panem anymore. Of course, I was never really thinking about the good of everyone else. I was thinking about revenge. Maybe that makes me a terrible person, but I've long since made peace with that.

I've never been so furious.

I've always been what my dad called "a little spitfire." I was a little too intense, a little too quick to anger. One time, after I lost my temper with the kid across the street, Dad taught me to take a deep breath and count to ten when I get angry. I've never made it that far. The highest I've ever managed to get is five.

Well, I'm done counting to five and trying to keep my temper in check. Next door, Finnick's Annie is screaming nonsense—something about the house always winning—and it makes my blood boil. She obviously doesn't know anything, which means that they're just doing it for fun. On my other side, Peeta has fallen silent, which means that he's luckier than Annie and me. But he's still just a kid, and his pain pisses me off, too.

It feels good to be angry. With as exhausted and hurting and cold and wet as I am, it's easy to give up. But giving up and losing myself to the darkness means that President Snow—may be burn in hell—has beaten me. He took _everything _from me; everything except myself. I'll be damned (which I might be anyway) if I'm going to let that son of a bitch have me.

I'm going to hang on, and I'll be the thorn in that son of a bitch's side. We're going to win this, and when we do, I'll see that we scatter his limbs to the corners of Panem and mount his head on a pike for everyone to see. I'll see that he's split into five pieces—one for every person he took from me—and I'll watch with delight when it happens. Maybe I'm supposed to be a bigger person or something like that, but I'm not. My revenge knows no bounds.

I take a deep breath and count to five, letting my anger increase with each number. I'll have my revenge, and that trumps being tired or hurt or cold or wet. I'm not tired or hurting anymore because my anger gives me the energy to ignore it. My anger is burning bright, white-hot and can't be put out by cold or damp. I'm Johanna Mason, I'm pissed, and I won't fade away.


End file.
